Hrrrm-hah. Well. The FrinkTank has delivered a little addendum to the last Tangled Bank. Sneaky. You knew those guys couldn’t possibly do everything conventionally.
Meanwhile, Tangled Bank #61 will be appearing at Epigenetics News next Wednesday. Send in those links!
The syllabus for Biol 4181, Developmental Biology is now online. Start reading! It looks like I’ll have you reading 50-100 pages of Wolpert and Carroll or Zimmer a week.
I want you all to know this is something of a miracle—I usually finish my syllabus the night before the class starts, so I’m very proud of myself for getting it done a whole four days ahead of time. Of course, the reason it’s early is that I’ve got a stack of extra-curricular writing that needs to be done in the next couple of days…
Douglas Theobald passed along an interesting collection of quotes from that atheist evolutionist, Adolph Hitler. It’s particularly interesting the he outlawed atheist and freethought groups in 1933.
It’s a long list of quotes, so I’ll tuck it below the fold.
Aaron Kinney makes a good point about claims that the Holocaust was Darwin-inspired:
I would argue that even if Hitler really did use Darwin’s theory as inspiration for the mass-murder of Jews, he got it wrong. Throwing millions of Jews into death camps is, in my opinion, artificial selection! It is stacking the decks, not proving the superior adaptability of a breed of human.
Exactly so. There are a lot of mistaken ideas about how an individual demonstrates a natural superiority to other individuals, and foremost among them is this belief that it always involves being “red in tooth and claw” and exterminating the competition (secondmost: that it is always those who have the most babies who win). Simple-minded aggression and heedless procreation actually seem to be very poor strategies for human beings, who are more the slow and deliberate type of replicator, dependent on conspecific cooperation. The kind of social Darwinism/eugenics that Hitler favored was not evolution or Darwinism—it owes more to farming folk knowledge than to the complexity of evolutionary theory.
Not that that will matter to the people peddling the Darwin-Hitler link. I think they’d have a better case if they were arguing for a pigeon fancier-Hitler link.
Chris Mooney did send me a copy of the new paperback edition of The Republican War on Science, so it’s official: he’s now the man who tried to kill me twice.
At least I can testify that a Mooney attack is survivable. I toughened myself up since the first edition with a regimen of Coulter and Wells, and if anything, Mooney is understating the tactics of the Right.
Chris Mooney is trying to kill me.
It’s true. He sent me this book, The Republican War on Science(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) (now available in a new paperback edition!), that he knew would send my blood pressure skyrocketing, give me apoplexy, and cause me to stroke out and die, gasping, clawing in futile spasms at the floor. Fortunately, I’ve been inoculating myself for the past few years by reading his weblog (now also in a new edition!), so I managed to survive, although there were a few chest-clutching moments and one or two life-flashing-past-my-eyes experiences, which will be handy if I ever write a memoir.
I have just received word that the Friends of Charles Darwin website is getting a facelift and will be relaunched tonight, at 21:30 BST, and everyone is supposed to simultaneously sip from a glass of malt whiskey. That’s in about 4 hours…hey, that’s tea time! We can’t be guzzling alcoholic beverages that early in the day!
If you’ve heard the strange little anecdote about GW Bush that’s going around, you will find Tild hilarious today. The illustration is perfect.
George Coyne, the Vatican astronomer, has been sacked. Red State Rabble and John Wilkins speak out on it.
They cite one source condescendingly claiming that Coyne “appointed himself an expert in evolutionary biology,” while Bruce Chapman of the Discovery Institute (speaking of unqualified gits appointing themselves the status of ‘expert’) calls Coyne an “evangelizing Darwinist,” and blames his fall on his radical theology. It seems to me that Coyne was actually a highly qualified scientist who was well-informed about the general principles of science, and who informed the Vatican about the actual status of the discipline of evolution within the domain of science. What this represents is a case of Catholicism once again rushing to bury its head in the sand—they can’t have someone who honestly represents the uncomfortable facts of science speaking out, after all. I’m sure his replacement will be better steeped in the dogma, will confine himself to a much less forthright position, and appreciates theology more than the science.
I hope George Coyne uses the freedom from one set of duties to reconsider that religion thing. It must be hard to serve two masters, especially when one is about enlightenment and knowledge, and the other is about ignorance and dogma.
Wow…so this mysterious stuff called dark matter actually exists? Sean Carroll gives us the context and the beautiful pictures, while MarkCC explains the math.
